Capitilising on Short Term Trends

When working in fast paced industries where capitalising on trends is paramount, the ability to adapt marketing activity at speed and scale is increasingly critical to success. This is especially challenging when working with global brands operating across multiple markets and languages, utilising both digital and above the line channels to promote their products.

Search campaigns often see uplifts in traffic around events like product launches but catching these bursts of interest as they are happening has long been a problem. Traditionally these uplifts would be surfaced using search query reports – which allow advertisers to see what search terms have driven traffic to their site. However, manually working through these reports can be inefficient and overlook short term trends as they rely on advertisers frequently reviewing queries over a given time frame.

To address these issues, our search teams have developed automated dashboards to help identify and highlight trends within their search query data. By surfacing this information in easily accessible alerts, accounts can be developed in a “little but often” manner, staying ahead of the curve by acting on trends as they appear.

SID

One such solution, nicknamed SID (Search Impressions Dashboard) shows the top rising search queries of the last 7 days. The dashboard updates daily and excludes current keywords from the results to specifically highlight queries that might benefit from being built out within the accounts. Segregating results to focus on different markets and categories of product adds an additional level of granularity that enables teams to identify specific opportunities and react accordingly.

An additional benefit of reviewing search queries this way is that rather than looking at a complete search terms, SID can also look at the individual words that make up a query to capture trends within trends. Consider the queries “kids blue shoes”, “blue sweatshirts” and “blue mens shoes”. These may not individually stand-out and might be overlooked by a traditional search query; however SID will highlight the word “blue” as a common trend within these queries. By aggregating impression data to deliver these more macro trends, SID helps both the team and their clients make better decisions about how to build out their accounts.

One example of this in practice would be conversations on how to best manage up and coming product terms. For clients SID acts as an early warning signal and allows them to plan how rising search volume might impact their wider marketing efforts. For example, if “blue mens shoes” is flagged as a rising trend the client may choose to build custom content and landing pages to provide the best possible experience for users reaching the site through those terms.

Summary

Through the use of tools like SID, focus is moving away from a flawed manual search query approach to paid search account development towards one of short-term adaptability and appreciation of users’ immediate wants and needs. By automating and sharing visibility on this process it is not only easier to identify valuable trends but easier to capitalise on them too.